Pool of Tears, a Murine Memoir

By Angus Brownfield

It ain’t easy, being a talking mouse. Add to that a bum leg and a couch potato figure, you have Dorothy Mustt, heroine of Angus Brownfield’s novel, Pool of Tears, first book of the Mustt Adventure series.
Talkers, as they call themselves, are the product of a failed genetic research project—failed in the eyes of its author. What she’s created are mice with speech and opposable thumbs, but much more, the ability to reason. They’re so smart, in fact, they adopt a Prime Directive: “Never, ever talk to a Human.” They saved from being euthanized by a human with a weak stomach, but even he doesn’t know they can talk.
What Talkers don’t have is culture, both a curse and a blessing. They look at the world with the innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall. Dorothy and her kin study humans via the ultra-dysfunctional family whose house they share and through endless hours in front of a TV set that’s always on. Their speech is John Wayne overlaid with Nova.
Dorothy falls in love with a human and can’t handle the emotion. She is Candide with four legs, Cyrano with twitchy whiskers, an overweight Madame Bovary. Her adventures pit her against a mouse tyrant, make her the protégé of a mouse sage, and lead her to break the Prime Directive for love.
A mixture of adventure and satire (plus a little interspecies love), Pool of Tears will leave you wanting more of Dorothy and the Talkers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angus Brownfield
• Release date: Apr 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458125941

Angus Brownfield

Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

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Pool Of Tears

A Murine Memoir

(Book one of the Mustt adventures)

SMASHWORDS EDITION

***

Published By

Angus Brownfield on Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 by Angus Brownfield

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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Pool Of Tears

‘Would it be of any use, now,’ thought Alice, ‘to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there's no harm in trying.’ So she began: ‘O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!’

Alice in Wonderland, Chapter II: The Pool of Tears

The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men

Gang aft agley.

Robert Burns

Table of Contents

chapter 1: Introducing Dorothy

chapter 2: A few words on where we come from

Dorothy Mustt’s Diary, Part 1: Bigs

chapter 3: Jason

chapter 4: Ramback house

chapter 5: On being a mouse

chapter 6: Jason on the brink

chapter 7: Mending Jason

chapter 8: Is it to be or not to be?

chapter 9: You ain’t talkin’ Christ

Dorothy Mustt’s Diary, Part 2: The Journey Back

chapter 10: Upside-down rain

chapter 11: One question too many

chapter 12: Heading for the beach

Chapter 13: June-June

chapter 14: Dream weed

chapter 15: Back in Subdivision

chapter 16: Decisions

chapter 17: War council

Dorothy Mustt’s Diary, Part 3: The Matrix’s Sanctuary

chapter 18: Keeping Subdivision free

chapter 19: We don’t assassinate

chapter 20: Stormy weather

chapter 21: Gilda and Joaquín

chapter 22: Jason meets Dorothy

chapter 23: Gilda on talking

chapter 24: An awful truth

chapter 25: The Matrix’s notebooks

Further Adventures Of A Talker

chapter 26: Calamity comes to Ramback House

chapter 27: Love note

chapter 28: The truth about Jason

chapter 29: Sadder than a teevee drama

chapter 30: Why

chapter 1: Introducing Dorothy

It might be hard to give up a cash mouse.

My name’s Gavin MacDonald. The words in quotes were spoken to me by one Dorothy Mustt, in a room within the Domestic Animal Control Center at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, down in sunny San Diego County.

Before you puzzle too much about the meaning of the sentence, think on this: the cash mouse was Dorothy herself; she spoke the words. Though she looked like an ordinary mouse in other respects, she displayed one odd feature: she possessed opposable thumbs. You probably wouldn’t notice them until she sat on her haunches and clasped her little hands together, like a sage deep in thought, or a penitent praying for mercy.

While you ponder that, think on this: to go with the opposable thumbs, she had the gift of speech.

A gift, indeed, it was. What took hominids evolving through perhaps four thousand generations to acquire, she inherited from a generation of transgenic mice engineered within the last ten years. That her speech and intelligence is the product of genetic tinkering—the addition of human genes to the mouse genome—does not in any way alter the fact that Dorothy, her family, and a whole tribe of Talkers, as they call themselves, are intelligent, feeling beings.

##

I was privileged to make Dorothy’s acquaintance through a series of accidents. I am a writer; my agent, David Minsch, was formerly an officer in US Army Counterintelligence, with residual connections within the intelligence community. The CIA was looking for contact with a writer who knew a house mouse from a ferret. I was, while attending college, an animal caretaker in a biomedical research lab. QED.

Why a writer? I was invited to edit (or more perfectly, transliterate) a diary Dorothy kept secreted on a computer in the humans’ house where she and the Mustt family resided. Thus, Dorothy Mustt was my cash mouse, and her reason for reminding me of it was a suspicion that I might be capable of betraying her to keep the cash flowing.

If you think a mouse keeping a diary is preposterous, think on this: she meant cash mouse as a joke, and a sarcastic one at that. It takes intelligence well beyond an African gray parrot’s to do more than mimic human speech. To crack a joke requires real intelligence. To be sarcastic implies feelings.

"Cash mouse is, of course, an allusion to cash cow," which in itself is a fairly sophisticated concept. I looked it up online to make sure I fully understood it. Dorothy learned it from watching television.

Dorothy was, when I met her, incarcerated on the Marine base. She was being taken quite seriously by her jailers, the CIA, so seriously my decision to help her escape her bounds has me in a foreign country, looking over my shoulder for agents who, at the least, would incarcerate me. In my nightmares I imagine much worse. The CIA’s interest in Dorothy is to find out where the rest of the Talkers are, so that they can exploit them as spies, microbot bombers and assassins.

I made the decision, as soon as I grasped that I was dealing with a languaged creature, and so far as I know the only one on the planet besides Man, to help Dorothy escape and rejoin her kind in terra incognita. All this intrigue is the subject of another book, should I live so long. What you will read here is how Dorothy Mustt came to the attention of the CIA, or at least the attention of the man who betrayed her to them.

That’s as much as you need to know to begin to make sense of what you read in the ensuing chapters, except to point out that Dorothy’s speech was heavily influenced by a couple of Scots, so that she uses contractions I’ve chosen to leave in the text, and a few words you may stumble over, such as ken (ken, kenning, kent) which means, roughly, to understand or grasp. I’ll let Dorothy, through her memoir, take it from there.

chapter 2: A few words on where we come from

One of my littermates, Brack, ca’ed me Crump not long after he could talk, and, when we got older, added Fat Broad. My proper name is Dorothy, but the ill-names he added hit home, fer I am a fat mouse with a lame hind leg.

I am of the Talkers, a tribe of mice created in the lab of The Matrix, a scientist named Eden Godwyn, and of the clan of Subdivisioners, crosst Wide Boulevard a generation after the Great Escape and found a living in the hidey-holes a Bigs’ homes. My family is the Mustts, and our Big family are the Rambacks, the lot a whom I will name as they come into my story, but here I mention especially my dear, sweet Jason, ca’ed Pony Boy by his littermates, fer reasons you shall see.

I ha’ sneaked peeks at the diary a young Miss Artemis Ramback, a creature both comely and nasty, the equal to her twin, Apollo. I know from this peek you aim the words in a diary at a body outside yourself. She says ‘Dear Diary,’ as if she writes to a person. ‘Cept fer this part in the front—case Jason is run over by a garbage truck—I’m writing mine to him, fer it’s on his own computer keys I dance from letter to letter, pushing ‘em down like in the cartoons the women wi’ washboards scrub the didees.

But my reason fer writing is no to please myself, but to make a record a what we Talkers ha’ come to. If Bigs be anything they be so taken up wi’ themselves they canna ken the notion of another talking creature, much less a mouse can read and write. It is the great fear of all Talkers they will discover us and ca up The Worst Case Scenario, which is our name fer their doing to us what they do to each other, wi’ rockets or gas or germs.

##

How we came about is known to a few and passed on as what Grandpa Scootch names ‘oral history,’ words he learnt from a show on the history channel he managed to stay awake through.

Seems The Matrix, what’s ca’ed a geneticist, wanted us to have thumbs, so’s she could discover how animals learn new tricks wi’ new powers. So she took some of her own DNA and lashed it onto some mouse DNA and made a critter like ordinary mice but with a thumb where ordinary mice have just a wee nub. She set up all sorts of spearmints and watched us, took pictures, had her graduate students watch us, expecting us to start swinging like monkeys and grabbin’ food through the cage bars and otherwise using these new body parts.

We didna oblige. We went on acting like mice. And so one a her mates, a feller she got The Notion wi’ now and again, told her to give us a gene fer smartness. And she did. She added some more of her DNA to a batch of mouse DNA and the mice who were born were not only smart enough to use our thumbs, they were smart enough not to.

See, wi’ the second batch of genes we started learning the gabble of Bigs in The Lab. Some was gobbledygook, words like recombination and genome, but from the ones fed us and cleaned our cages, like Jock Campbell and Charlie Ruiz, we learned ordinary words, like pellets and water and wood shavings.

And right from the start some wise mouse—many will say ‘twas Gilda herself—spoke out the Prime Directive: never never ever talk to a Big. No one knows why, just seemed risky, letting Bigs know we talked. And it seemed natural not to let ‘em know we understood talk either, so to all the games and mazes and special treats fer doing tricks we stayed as dumb as the Mutes who lived down the hall and out in the wilds outside Subdivision.

But in the end what we thought would save us was nearly our doom, fer The Matrix decided we were a flop and ended her spearmints. We were to be killt, so’s we’d not make pinkies with any mice dinna have thumbs. Was our luck Charlie Ruiz was on night shift when that order came down, fer he couldna kill us, being kind and also afraid a chemicals and such, so he put us out, thrown willy-nilly into a garbage can, and left a note on the can lid to take it, no opent, to the dump.

The night a the Great Escape a fearsome wind rose and blew Charlie Ruiz’s note away, and the garbage men, leery of anythin’ outside The Lab they couldna explain, left the can with all the Talkers in it. A raccoon was not so leery, she smellt a meal there, and pusht the can over, worked off the lid, and caught three of my ancestors whilst the rest scattered. Some made it into The Lab, where Gilda had discovered Secret Chambers. She is said to ha’ stood on a window ledge and hollered Ollie Ollie Oxen Free. I’ve found safety. Come in from the night. Ollie Ollie Oxen Free! Fourteen mice climbed up the downspout and leapt to the window ledge, to follow Gilda to Secret Chambers. No one knows what become a the mice who didn’t follow her, but they were never seen again.

DOROTHY MUSTT’S DIARY, PART 1: Bigs

chapter 3: Jason

I must write of Jason first, fer twixt me and him there lies a sad tale of unrequited love cross species.

Time out of mind, all stories begin. Time out of mind those a Jason’s species were simply big, so big that’s what we called ‘em: Bigs. Cat-big you could ken, rat-big, too, would snatch a wee one from the nest and feed its young on ours. But they were big like houses, big as wind blowing trees, lightening big—beyond kenning.

Yet just there, like the sky, the street outside, the cupboard where the traps were, just there.

Our kind came to Ramback House, says Grandpa Scootch, from The Lab. Was in the days of his grandpa, after the Great Escape, the night a heroine named Gilda led a band a mouse kin to the Secret Chambers in the hamsters’ house. Was another group, the Hardy Band, struck out from The Lab that night and came direct to Subdivision. After a time they sent back one scout after another to tell those in Secret Chambers of the good life in houses of Bigs. ‘Twas a fearless few—Grandpa Scootch, Grandma Blenda, and my aunt, Baney Sue, among ‘em—finally got the urge and struck out fer Subdivision, crossing Wide Boulevard in the wee hours, steering clear a deadly autos and slipping by raccoons, guard dogs and house cats to find, under the floors and in the basements and even walls a the Bigs’ houses, The Good Life.

Was fierce debate among those in Secret Chambers says Grandpa, bout leaving or staying, some moutht excuses to stay, like preferring hamster chow to the White Coats’ bologna sandwiches and oreos when the real reason is, change was scary.

So the ones not so scared did it, and my kin chose the Ramback’s house—willy-nilly, cause it be right on Wide Boulevard, vacant a mice (not kenning ‘twas vacant on account a traps and pizon) and only one cat lived there, named Pony Boy, fer to spite Jason, too well fed to be much of a hunter, and one old feeble dog, called Fart, couldna hunt neither, and the pantry so messy there were always macaroni, quick oats, or raisins lying aboot, victuals the Bigs never missed. They threw pretty good veggies in the trash basket, too, and meat bones that wouldn’t go down the garbage grinder, and, luck of luck, one Ramback was a night owl, Master Jason, and he was plumb messy, wi’ peanuts and chips a corn and potato.

We had no idee there were different kinds a Bigs, fer though we had speech our thoughts were as innocent as our kin caged in the Cognitive Science Lab, down the hall from Secret Chambers. When we came here a thing was a thing: you ate it, you lived in it, you shunned it like a trap.

But though we learned important facts aboot the world from them, we also learned the Rambacks wirna the prize catch in Subdivision. While some Bigs be kind and generous, treating all persons like persons, some be terrible rascals, wi’ guns or swords or airplanes tha’ rained down death on innocent folks or blew ‘em up in far off places. Grandpa Scootch said was television made us Musts so smart, what wi’ the Rambacks' way of leaving it on when gone, the blue light fuzzing up the window glass to thwart the stealy boys.

Grandpa Scootch was first to ken the value of teevee chatter. Said Grandpa Scootch, Twas the pictures on the screen. We kenned they showed folks like the Rambacks. We kenned the scurrying aboot and heard ’em talking, we began to realize something of Bigs, their world so vast Subdivision be tiny, like we wee mice seem tiny to Bigs. We used our powers a speech to learn the world.

Grandpa Scootch would tell it a hundred times in his old talk. We judged those mighty feet, their iron-hard soles, connected to a brain and a heart not meek and dainty like ours, Bigs thought they was by God gods.

We picked up teevee words: Holy molars, Batman! or, Now hang on, Pardner. Useful, silly but useful. We learned a the pizon grain from teevee ads, and Mumsy learned to say no when Poptart got his whiskers atwitch and sang her songs in mouse talk, looking to make another batch of wee ones. Grandpa Scootch is enormous old and says he’s lived twice what his pa did who lived twice his pa's time, even if he didna ken the teevee gabble.

Which put in my mind early on the view we are living longer and changing faster—all Talkers are. Whether ‘tis speech or thumbs or something else we have that mice out in the fields beyond Subdivision donna, we be here long enough these days to have a life (another expression from the teevee).

And though we ha’ grown to three generations a Musts, there was only one a Rambacks, Peter called Popsy and wife Wanda, known as Mum, and their four children. My brother, Brack, says times come we outlive Bigs, cause Bigs be destroying themselves, and mice will inherit the world. To which my other brothers, Zack (R.I.P.), Mack, Shaq and Frac would always add, Amen.

‘Mustt’ is the family name we mice descended from Grandpa Scootch and Grandma Blenda adopted, in the style of Bigs, a last name fer all the young’uns, whom I’ll introduce as they come into my tale. I am officially Dorothy Mustt, but my family never calls me that, I’m Microchip to Popsy, and Crump to Brack, who in